The Sin Between Us

Chapter 4: I fly out on Thursday

The photo lived on my phone like a small, kept thing.

I had moved it into its own folder three days after he sent it, which was either practical or pathetic depending on how honest I was with myself.

Just the sky.

The ordinary kind, the kind that exists above every house in every city, unremarkable except for the specific coordinates of where it had been taken and by whom and after what kind of evening.

I knew all of that every time I looked at it, which was more often than I was going to admit to anyone, including myself.

I had stayed over in the guest room because my grandmother had asked me to and because I was bad at saying no to her and because some part of me, the part I was least proud of, had noted that his car was still in the driveway when I agreed.

Sunday morning I came downstairs early. The house had that particular morning quiet it only gets when everyone else is still asleep…thick and unhurried, full of the smell of old wood and whatever my grandmother had set to simmer the night before.

I had planned to make coffee and sit alone and do the sensible work of talking myself back to level ground.

Jude was at the kitchen table.

Coffee already in front of him, a newspaper open and folded to the back section, reading glasses pushed up on his nose that he only wore when he thought no one was looking.

He glanced up when I came in. Said good morning the way you say it when morning is still new and neither of you has the energy for more than that. Then he went back to his paper.

My grandmother was at the stove without having appeared to get there.

She set a mug in front of me before I'd sat down fully, filled it without asking how I took it because she had known how I took it for twenty-six years, and went back to whatever she was doing at the stove.

The three of us sat in the quiet kitchen in the early gray light.

It was the most normal thing in the world. It felt like standing on a floor I wasn't sure would hold.

I wrapped both hands around the mug and looked at the table and said nothing.

He turned a page. My grandmother hummed something low and tuneless to herself.

Outside, a bird was making an argument about something in the oak tree by the fence.

The coffee was strong the way she always made it, and the kitchen smelled like it always smelled, and I sat across from a man I had known my entire life and felt like I was learning a new language with no dictionary.

"Biscuits in about ten minutes," my grandmother said, to neither of us specifically.

"Thank you, Grandma," I said.

Jude looked up.

"Can I do anything?"

"You can sit there and look handsome," she said, which was what she said to every man in the family when they offered to help, and which she meant as dismissal.

He smiled and went back to his paper. I looked into my coffee.

Ten minutes passed like that. Twenty. I refilled my mug.

He finished the back section and folded the paper closed and sat with his coffee and looked out the window at the yard, where the morning was doing slow, pale things with the light.

I should have looked somewhere else. I looked at the yard too, which meant we were both looking at the same thing, which felt like more than it was and also exactly like what it was.

The rest of the family came down around seven-thirty and the quiet broke apart the way quiet always does when a family descends on a kitchen… all at once, overlapping, filling every available space with noise and appetite and strong opinions.

My grandfather wanted to know where his specific coffee mug was.

My uncle wanted to know if there was any of the good orange juice left or just the regular.

Two of my younger cousins appeared already in some kind of dispute that my aunt was mediating without much conviction.

I was grateful for all of it. The noise gave me somewhere to put my eyes.

I was only partially successful.

"You've been staring at Uncle Jude for like twenty minutes."

Brianna said it right next to my ear, low enough that it was only for me, and I felt my whole body temperature change.

She was smiling when I turned…. that particular smile of hers meant she found something mildly funny and had no deeper intention than sharing it.

She was already leaning back, reaching for the juice.

No weight behind it. No suspicion.

Just Brianna, catching me doing something she found faintly amusing, the way she caught everyone doing things.

"I was thinking," I said.

"Sure you were." She poured her juice.

I turned back to my plate and held my mug with both hands and felt the heat rise up my neck in a slow, humiliating wave.

Brianna teased everybody. It was practically her primary function at family gatherings, a kind of ambient, affectionate commentary on whatever was happening around her, aimed at everyone equally, forgotten almost immediately.

She had already moved on.

She was asking someone across the table about something, laughing, entirely elsewhere.

But I couldn't move on.

Because Brianna hadn't meant anything by it and still she had seen it.

And if she had seen it …even as a joke, even as nothing worth examining, it meant it was visible.

Sitting on my face for anyone paying mild attention to notice.

And if it was sitting on my face it was more real than I had been allowing it to be, more real than almost-nothing or complicated or any of the other soft words I'd been using to avoid calling it what it was.

I ate the rest of my breakfast looking at my plate and spoke when I was spoken to and contributed nothing to the conversation that I hadn't been asked to contribute.

Across the table, Jude talked to my grandfather about something in the paper.

His voice was the same as always. He laughed at something my uncle said. He was completely, maddeningly normal.

I needed to get out of this kitchen!.

I helped with cleanup after.

Scraped plates and stacked dishes and wiped down the counter and let my grandmother direct me like she always did, and it was fine, it was easy, it gave my hands something to do that wasn't reaching for my phone.

I hugged her at the door for longer than necessary and she patted my back twice and said eat more, you look thin the way she always did regardless of what I looked like.

My mom caught me in the driveway asking whether I needed anything from Costco, whether I was out of paper towels, whether I'd eaten properly this week. I answered all of it on autopilot. Yes, no, yes.

I was putting my shoes on in the hallway, sitting on the little bench by the door where we'd all sat putting shoes on since we were children…when I heard the floorboards behind me.

Everyone else was still in the back of the house. I knew before I looked up.

Jude stood a few feet away with his jacket over his arm. He looked at me the way he'd been not quite looking at me all morning, directly, but with something carefully managed behind it.

"I wanted to tell you something before you left," he said.

I finished the lace I was tying.

"Okay."

"I have a project. London." He paused. "I fly out Thursday."